What Is the Point of Mozilla?

Few journeys in the world of open source
have been as exciting as Mozilla's. Its
birth was dramatic. Netscape,
the pioneering company whose Netscape
Navigator browser shaped the early Web, had enjoyed the most
successful IPO up until then, valuing the 18-month-year-old company
at nearly $3 billion. That was in 1995. Three years later, the
company was in freefall, as the browser wars took their toll,
and Microsoft continued to gain market share with its Internet
Explorer, launched alongside Windows 95. Netscape's response was
bold and unprecedented. On January 27, 1998, it announced that it
was making the source code for the next generation of its web browser freely
available under a GPL-like license.

Although of huge symbolic importance for the still-young Free Software
world—the term "open source" was coined only a month after
Netscape's announcement—the release and transformation of the code
for what became the Mozilla browser suite was fraught with difficulties.
The main problem was trying to re-write the often problematic legacy code
of Netscape Navigator. Mozilla 1.0 was
finally released in 2002, but by then, Internet Explorer dominated the
sector. The failure of the Mozilla browser to make much of an impact
ultimately spurred development of the completely new Firefox browser.
Version 1.0 was launched in 2004, after three
years of work.

Microsoft's failure to update its flabby Internet Explorer 6 browser
for more than five years meant that successive releases of Firefox were
steadily gaining market share—and fans. As I wrote in Linux
Journal in June 2008:

Three things are striking about the recent launch of Firefox 3.
First, the unanimity about the quality of the code: practically everyone
thinks it's better in practically every respect. Secondly, the way in which
the mainstream media covered its launch: it was treated as a normal,
important tech story—gone are the days of supercilious anecdotes
about those wacky, sandal-wearing free software anoraks. And
finally—and perhaps most importantly—the scale and intensity of participation by
the millions of people who have downloaded the software in the last
week.

My hope then was that the evident success and enthusiasm would drive
Firefox to ever-greater market share, and help spread open source and its
values to a wider audience. As the Statcounter graph of browser
market share worldwide shows, Firefox did indeed continue to achieve
greater market penetration for a while. In November 2009, it held around
32% of the sector globally. But since then, Firefox's market share has
steadily but inexorably fallen; it now stands at around 5%. Google's
Chrome, meanwhile, has ascended to 59%. Even if we are rightly doubtful
about the detailed accuracy of those figures, the trends are inarguable:
Firefox peaked a decade ago and shows no sign of halting its slow decline.

The Mozilla project has stumbled in various ways
during that time. Valuable energy and resources
were diverted to the Firefox phone project, which started
in 2013 and closed
in 2016. In 2014, Mozilla foolishly flirted with placing
ads on Firefox. The next year, Mitchell Baker, Chair of
the Mozilla Foundation and self-styled Chief Lizard Wrangler, posed
the question of "whether Mozilla remains the best
organizational and legal home for Thunderbird", Mozilla's
standalone email client. This caused many to wonder whether
Thunderbird's days were numbered. Fortunately, in 2017, Mozilla
confirmed that it would continue to "serve as the legal and fiscal
home for the Thunderbird project".

Perhaps Mozilla's biggest blunder
was its decision to add support for the closed-source
DRM W3C standard Encrypted
Media Extensions (EME) in Firefox. As well as ignoring good
technical reasons why this was the wrong thing to do, Mozilla's
blessing of EME effectively legitimized DRM and validated it as a
standard part of the hitherto open web. Although supposedly "only"
for video streams, EME sets a precedent. Given the insatiable
appetite the copyright industry has for control, it seems only
a matter of time before DRM is applied to web pages themselves—no copying allowed. What's particularly sad is Mozilla's weak
attempt in 2014 to justify the move:

We have come to the point where Mozilla not implementing the
W3C EME specification means that Firefox users have to switch to other
browsers to watch content restricted by DRM.

Despite Mozilla's kowtowing to the video streaming industries, Firefox
users have continued to switch to other browsers anyway: market
share has dropped from 14% in 2014 to today's woeful 5%. In other words,
Mozilla betrayed its core mission to preserve the open internet, for no
gain whatsoever.

Meanwhile, Mozilla has flourished financially. The most recent "State of
Mozilla" report says that in 2016 various deals with search engines brought
in an
astonishing $520 million. And to its credit, Mozilla has started to
deploy those resources in all kinds of interesting and innovative ways.
Reflecting this, in 2016, it released its strategy document "Fueling
the Movement", with the subtitle "Ensuring the Internet is a global
public resource, open and accessible to all". That's rather ironic, given
its support a couple years earlier for DRM, which has the sole purpose of
making online material private, closed and inaccessible for most people.

The 2016 State of Mozilla report describes some of the organization's more
recent work in the field of advocacy:

The Mozilla Foundation runs campaigns to educate and empower
citizens across the web. In 2016, this included an education campaign on
the critical role encryption plays in everyday internet life. Launched
amidst the February 2016 Apple v. FBI case, campaign videos simplified
complex online security issues for the public and the media. Over the
course of 2016 and 2017, Mozilla also ran campaigns around the need for
more creative, internet-friendly copyright in the European Union and on the
continued importance of protecting net neutrality in the United States. In
late 2017, Mozilla launched a "privacy not included" holiday
shopping guide reviewing toys and other electronics—this was a first
step in a large scale plan for consumer engagement on data and privacy
issues.

The organization launched what it called its "Mozilla
Manifesto" back in 2007, which includes the first hints of an
increasing emphasis on work outside the software field. The 2016 State of
Mozilla report, and the projects that have followed it, confirm that this
is an increasingly active area for the project. That's hugely welcome;
privacy, encryption, net neutrality and security are under threat as never
before. But it raises an important question: should Mozilla be a software
project that uses some of its resources for key advocacy work or an
advocacy organization funded by its programs?

Mozilla's ill-judged adoption of the EME standard downgraded Firefox from a
long-standing beacon of software freedom to a well-featured browser much
like any other. By contrast, Mozilla's not-for-profit status, exceptional
financial resources, and worldwide network of smart people passionate about
the open internet and its values, mean that it has unique advantages as a
trusted advocacy organization.

Open source has won, so Mozilla's original mission to promote free software
is no longer a priority. Instead, what we do desperately need is a
powerful, truly independent voice willing to speak up for ordinary users of
the internet on today's key issues and to defend uncompromisingly their
broader interests in the online world. Mozilla is probably the only
organization capable of doing this credibly. It urgently needs to broaden
and deepen its already substantial advocacy
activities yet further—for the common good, and its own
relevance.

Glyn Moody has been writing about the internet since 1994, and about free
software since 1995. In 1997, he wrote the first mainstream feature about
GNU/Linux and free software, which appeared in Wired. In 2001,
his book Rebel Code: Linux And The Open Source Revolution was
published.
Since then, he has written widely about free software and digital rights.
He has a blog, and he is
active on social media: @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+.